My Perfect Life

I want to find a place fairly close to San Diego that is very rural and beautiful. Like the type of beauty that you see in pictures in a travel agent's office. But a place that no one knows about, so if I lived there, I wouldn't have to deal with tourists littering my beautiful town. I want this place to have a small town center where I can buy stuff and see everybody who lives in the town. These people are rural, so they'll probably be Jesus freaks, but in my fantasy, nobody is crazy enough to put the Ten Commandments on a rock on the side of the road on their property. They just love God and that's it. And in this town, everyone has trucks, but not anything bigger than an F-250. And everybody drives the speed limit. And if someone behind them wants to drive faster than the speed limit, they let that person pass them.
And in this town, there's a diner. It's the only restaurant in town, but it has the best cobbler of any flavor you have ever tasted. And it has BBQ that makes you cream your pants when you think about it. Truckers take a longer route in delivering stuff just to come here. And the guy that owns the diner hooks all the locals up with great deals sometimes, and talks to the people in the town, and his wife is a waitress and she's the nicest lady you'll ever meet and calls everybody stuff like sugar pie and sweet pea. She has a really warm country accent.
So once I find this town, I'm going to run away there. I'm going to buy Hunting for Dummies, Farming for Dummies, and Carpenting for Dummies. I'm going to buy a run-down cottage on the hillside of the town, about a 5 minute drive into the town center. I'm going to have a view of mountains behind a lake with tons of trees around. I'm going to read all my books, plant some veggies and fruit, fix up my house, and the only time I'm not eating food I've grown or killed, I'll go to the diner, or get a little something fast from the market in town. Realistically, I'd probably go to the diner and market a lot, but living off of my own farming and hunting just sounds cool.
And then most of my nights will be spent watching the sun set behind the mountains, while I sit in a rocking chair I made on my porch. And I'll get a dog and sit with him and throw him a stick every once in a while. And I'll see my family and friends all the time, and I'll offer to come drive anywhere but everybody just wants to come to my house because it's perfect. And I just happened to get really good at carpenting and made a little guest house on my property with 2 bedrooms. I decide to become a carpenter for a living, there's good money in it because everybody's houses are made out of wood.
And I'll find myself the perfect country woman. And she'll cook all the time so I cut the quick market meals out of my life. And we will make beautiful children and grow old and die in that cottage. We will travel the world, but come back to our home where we live in solitude until the end. I hope I die in my rocking chair I made, just looking at the mountains.

Summer Time and The Livin's Easy

I was walking into my house from work just now and realized it finally smells like Summer. I love the smell of Summer nights. I can't really say exactly what it smells like, it's just one of those smells I've come to know and really love. I guess it's probably the smell of hot grass. Because Palm Springs always smells super summery. And I only go there in Summer. And there is a lot of heat and grass there.
So this is where my life is right now. I have a new job, a new car, it's summer. I'm Rancho Citizen of the Month (thank you again for the fantastic honor), and here's the kicker. I actually like my job. I'll be honest, being a bus boy kind of sucks sometimes. You clean shit up, that kind of sucks. But on the real, I make good money, work hard, rarely talk to customers, and work with really nice people. Being fired from Outback was a beautiful demise. It made me not even want to work at a restaurant anymore. But I realized what I hated was waiting tables. And maybe that might be just because I worked at a place where serving sucks. I won't get into it too much, but all I'll say is this. I am never finding myself stopping what I'm doing at my new job and hyperventilating so I don't have a complete meltdown and start yelling at anyone. Or anything. At Outback there were a few times where I wanted to yell at the computer systems. And definitely some people I worked with. And definitely some customers.
Here are the differences with Outback and Old Town Mexican Cafe:
-OTMC has a lot more older people working there (late 20's, maybe 30's), and I think that actually has some difference on the work ethic. Lots of people at OTMC joke about the work ethic of the other servers there, but I think they would be surprised how bad it is at other places.
-Most people at OTMC do not go to school (at least in my observation), so for many people, this is what they actually wake up everyday to do (another reason why I think the work ethic is different at OTMC).
-Here is the main difference. I feel like I have much more in common with people at Outback. We all grew up in the same area and most of us went to Valhalla at some point, so we have the same kind of background. At OTMC everybody is from different places and they have different senses of humor and I was really shy at first. But, at least with new people, I think OTMC people are more friendly. I've already been invited to a strip club and house parties. I wasn't invited anywhere at Outback for a long time.
Do I miss Outback? I miss everybody that works there a lot. I feel like they were a big part of my life for a long time. But I am generally happier where I work now a lot more. I'm more appreciated. Just to toot my own horn a bit: my manager who works at Lips restaurant on Wednesday nights as a drag queen said I'm the best thing that's happened to this retaurant. Are you kidding me? I would've never heard that at Outback. So, in short, fuck off Outback, I've moved on. And fuck off bad economy, I'm recession proof.